Winter is Coming (40 page)

As Russian troops and armored columns advance in Eastern Ukraine the Ukrainian government begs for aid from the free world. That’s the same free world Ukrainians hoped would receive them and protect them as one of its own after the protesters of Maidan grasped their victory paid in blood. The leaders of the free world, meanwhile, are still struggling to find the right terminology to free themselves from the moral responsibility to provide that protection. Putin’s invasion of a sovereign European nation is an “incursion,” much like Crimea—remember Crimea?—was an “uncontested arrival” instead of Anschluss. A civilian airliner was blown out of the sky by Russian-backed and Russian-armed (and likely Russian, period) forces in Eastern Ukraine and, despite the 298 victims, the outrage quickly dissipated into polite discussions about whether it should be investigated as a crime, a war crime, or neither.

This vocabulary of cowardice emanating from Berlin and Washington is as disgraceful as the “black is white” propaganda produced by Putin’s regime, and even more dangerous. Moscow’s smokescreens are hardly necessary in the face of so much willful blindness. Putin’s lies are obvious and expected. European leaders and the White House are even more eager than the Kremlin to pretend this conflict is local and so requires nothing more than vague promises from a very safe distance. As George Orwell wrote in his 1946 essay on language, right before starting work on his novel
1984
(surely not a coincidence), “But if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.” The Western rhetoric of appeasement creates a self-reinforcing loop of mental and moral corruption. Speaking the truth now would mean confessing to many months of lies, just as it took years—and this war—for Western leaders to finally admit Putin didn’t belong in the G7.

New Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko met with President Obama in Washington in September 2014, but Obama’s subsequent statement showed no sign he was willing to acknowledge reality. Generic wishes about “mobilizing the international community” were bad enough when it all started. Hearing them repeated as Ukrainian towns fell to Russian troops is a parody. I suggested at the time that Poroshenko should have worn a T-shirt saying “It’s a War, Stupid” to the meeting. As Russian tanks and artillery push back the overmatched Ukrainian forces, Obama’s repeated insistence that there is no military solution in Ukraine sounds increasingly delusional. There is no time to teach a drowning man to swim.

The United States, Canada, and even Europe have responded to Putin’s aggression, it is true, but always a few moves behind, always after the deterrent potential of each action had passed. Strong sanctions and a clear demonstration of support for Ukrainian territorial integrity as I recommended at the time would have had real impact when Putin moved on Crimea in February and March. A sign that there would be real consequences would have split his elites as they pondered the loss of their coveted assets on both sides of the Atlantic.

Then in April and May, the supply of defensive military weaponry would have forestalled the invasion currently under way, or at least raised its price considerably and thereby made the Russian public a factor in the Kremlin’s decision-making process much earlier. Those like me who called for such aid at the time were called warmongers, and policy makers again sought dialogue with Putin. And yet war arrived regardless, as it always does in the face of weakness.

As one of the pioneers of the analogy and the ominous parallels, I feel the irony in how it quickly went from scandal to cliché to compare Putin to Hitler in the media, for better and for worse. Certainly Putin’s arrogance and language remind us more and more of Hitler, as do the rewards he’s reaped from them. For this he can thank the overabundance of Chamberlains in the halls of power today—and there is no Churchill in sight. War comes from weakness, not strength.

As long as it is easy, as long as Putin collects his triumphs without resistance, he gains more support. He took Crimea with barely a shot fired. He flooded Eastern Ukraine with agents and weaponry while Europe dithered. The oligarchs who might have pressured Putin at the start of his Ukrainian adventure are now war financiers with no graceful exit. So many bridges have been burned that the Kremlin’s pressure points now are harder to reach.

The humiliating failure of the two peace agreements signed in Minsk proved that leaders of the free world simply refuse to admit that there is no dealing with Putin the way they deal with one another. There is no mutually beneficial business as usual. He exploits and abuses every opening and feels no obligation to operate by the rule of law or human rights inside or outside of Russia. Putin is a lost cause and Russia will also be a lost cause until he is gone. It was an error from the start to treat Putin like any other leader, but now there are no more excuses.

Putin won’t back down or be kicked out of Ukraine until credible threats to his power create a split among his elites and advisors. Right now they have no incentive to bet against him. Putin protects them and their assets while the free world they so enjoy living in has made no moves that would finally force them to choose between their riches and Putin. Changing that calculus is the only nonmilitary way to protect Ukraine—and wherever Putin goes next to find new enemies to feed into the propaganda machine that keeps him in power at home.

Obama and Europe’s leaders still want to play by the rules even after Putin ripped up the rule book and threw the shreds in their faces. Sanctioning a few of Putin’s political hacks is a joke and the Kremlin’s elites are right to laugh. To take a phrase from the aptly titled
All the President’s Men,
“Follow the money!” Sanction the elites who support Putin, go after all the family members they use to hide their assets abroad, and scrutinize their companies. Putin’s oligarchs openly support an administration that directly sponsors terrorists in Ukraine; surely there are ways to go after them and their assets. If existing laws are inadequate to deal with billionaire thugs who enable a dangerous regime, write new ones. And do it quickly.

The Russian military commanders, the ones in the field, are not fools. They are aware that NATO is watching and could blow them to bits in a moment. They rely on Putin’s aura of invincibility, which grows every day the West refuses to provide Ukraine with military support. Those commanders must be made to understand that they are facing an overwhelming force, that their lives are in grave danger, that they can and will be captured and prosecuted. To make this a credible threat requires immediate military aid, if not yet the “boots on the ground” everyone but Putin is so keen to avoid. If NATO nations continue to refuse to send lethal aid to Ukraine it will be yet another green light to Putin.

Once again, Putin lies about small things while carrying out his larger threats and goals. He denied there were ever Russian troops in Crimea for a year and then in a Russian documentary aired on March 16, 2015, proudly described deploying thousands of Russian special forces to the Ukrainian peninsula. Of course no one could pretend to be shocked since it had been known practically from the beginning, thanks to satellite photography combined with reporters, bloggers, and locals on social media posting photos of Russian troops and weapons. It should teach us a lesson about what sort of human being he is. If he has a goal, any lies, crimes, or violence needed to achieve that goal are perfectly acceptable and should be expected. After all, he told you what he was going to do. You don’t get to complain about how he does it. This is also how Putin has run Russia for fifteen years.

The same circumstances are unfolding with the far larger Russian force in Eastern Ukraine today, which is only growing despite the latest “Minsk II” ceasefire charade. Between “ceasefires” the Russia-backed forces took hundreds of square kilometers more of Ukrainian territory and created hundreds of new casualties. The death toll is now well over six thousand. In a few more months Putin will probably admit to that, too, and perhaps pin medals on the missile crew that shot down MH17. Why not? He enjoys flaunting his lies in the faces of his victims and the leaders of the free world who refuse to protect them. In the same documentary, Putin said he’d been ready to put Russia’s nuclear arsenal at the highest level of alert over Crimea. He says things like this because he knows the impact it will have in the West. The people and leaders of the free world that brought down the Soviet empire have forgotten what saber rattling sounds like.

Putin is no master strategist. He’s an aggressive poker player facing weak opposition from a Western world that has become so risk averse that it would rather fold than call any bluff, no matter how good its cards are. In the end, Putin is a Russian problem, of course, and Russians must deal with how to remove him. He and his repressive regime, however, are supported directly and indirectly by the free world due to this one-way engagement policy. We must recall the painful memories about the fatal dangers of appeasing a dictator, of disunity in the face of aggression, and of greedily grabbing at an ephemeral peace while guaranteeing a lasting war.

As always when it comes to stopping dictators, with every delay the price goes up. Western leaders have protested over the potential costs of action in Ukraine at every turn only to be faced with the well-established historical fact that the real costs of inaction are always even higher. Now the only options left are risky and difficult, and yet they must be tried. The best reason for acting to stop Putin today is brutally simple: it will only get harder tomorrow.

It is impossible to pinpoint the exact moment at which we stopped looking for leadership from our leaders and started caring only about realpolitik and lesser evils. Before the last rivets of the Iron Curtain hit the ground, as the West patted itself on the back and squandered the peace dividend, voters and parliaments around the world began looking for managers instead of visionaries.

I was reminded of this very keenly on December 11, 2011. Death played a cruel twist when he took the poet, dissident, and human rights champion Vaclav Havel and the mad overlord of North Korea Kim Jong-il at nearly the same moment. The media response was predictable, ignoring the leader of the Velvet Revolution and unleashing a flood of conjecture about the twenty-eight-year-old Kim Jong-un becoming the leader of a nuclear-armed prison camp of a nation located right in the middle of Russia, China, and Japan. Concern was understandable, but it was ironic that all that guesswork was taken seriously when no one outside Pyongyang even knew Kim Jong-il was dead for forty-eight hours.

It was worse than ironic that Havel’s death, and, more importantly, his amazing life, were swept aside for tales about a lunatic’s love of movies and French cognac. Instead of speculating about an unknown heir in North Korea, what about asking about a successor to the great moral leadership of Vaclav Havel? Who is there to carry the banner of freedom from oppression in all its forms? The playwright Havel—the artist, the dreamer—lived two-thirds of his life under a Communist regime and knew that liberty had to be fought for with every weapon on every front.

I first met Havel in Prague in 1990, when he was a newly elected president. He was quick to use his new stature to promote the pro-democracy activities of others, especially in what was then still the USSR. I was invited to attend a conference of Soviet dissidents chaired by Vladimir Bukovsky, and Havel insisted that it take place in newly liberated Prague. Incredibly, he was forced to fight elements in his own government that were afraid of offending the Kremlin, and in my recollection Havel was the only senior member of the Czech administration to attend.

At various points during and after his tenure, Havel was criticized for not being an effective executive, for failing to become a politician and a deal maker. But looking at his achievements, especially with an eye on Moscow, such critiques ignore what matters most. Havel presided over the collapse of Czechoslovakia without a drop of blood being spilled at a time when Yugoslavia was in the middle of a horrific civil war. He created the foundations of a democratic establishment free of ties to the Communist and KGB past while Boris Yeltsin failed to root out the entrenched bureaucracy, the
nomenklatura,
and left a KGB successor. Today the Czech Republic and Slovakia are thriving democracies while Russians are fighting the battle for individual liberty all over again. Principles matter, results matter, and Havel succeeded like few others.

Such outspoken courage inevitably serves as a model. Havel served as an ethical tuning fork for Eastern Europeans the way Andrei Sakharov did for the Soviet peoples. His health was already fading when we met for the last time at the Czech embassy in Moscow in 2007, but his eyes saw Vladimir Putin clearly. He was disgusted by those who negotiated with evil instead of calling it what it was.

In a 2004 essay Havel wrote on North Korea, he spelled out the eternal truth about dictators: “Decisiveness, perseverance and negotiations from a position of strength are the only things that Kim Jong-il and those similar to him understand.” No talk of appeasement, no treating human rights like just another bargaining chip. If we had more leaders like Vaclav Havel, we would not have nearly as much to worry about from dictators like Kim Jong-il.